I Capture the Castle

As the primary theme of I Capture the Castle, the concept of authorship and its creative, social, and financial obligations is centered on the characters of Cassandra and James Mortmain. Cassandra and her father are trying to understand their personal authorship in relation to each other and the lives of their family, with the novel’s conclusion showing both embracing the role that authorship plays in their lives. Furthermore, the introduction of the Cotton family to their social circle—and the Cottons’ love for literary arts—motivates Cassandra and her father to understand their personal version of authorship.

As the novel is told through Cassandra’s journal entries, the novel itself embodies her search for authorship and her eventual acceptance of what authorship means to her. She begins with a desire to “capture” the castle through description. More than that, however, Cassandra uses journaling “partly to practise my newly acquired speed-writing and partly to teach myself how to write a novel—I intend to capture all our characters and put in conversations” (4). In this way, Cassandra’s journal chronologizes the discovery of her authorship, as she learns that her journal allows her to write the kind of novel she wants to write: “Now that life has become so much more exciting I think of this journal as a story I am telling” (131). What her journaling requires of her—descriptions of her natural surroundings and family, conversations taken in shorthand, and keeping to a consistent writing schedule—allows Cassandra to experience the life of an author and create a relationship with her writing. More than these requirements, however, is the necessity for Cassandra to write of her own misery. She is committed to writing truthfully and does not stop journaling even after falling in love with Rose’s fiancée. She admits to daydreaming Rose into an antagonistic role in her life, chronologizes her mistakes in encouraging Stephen’s affections and planning how she can replace Rose in Simon’s life. This impulse toward realism is discovered early, when Cassandra notes that “the truth seems to flow out as fast as I can get it down” (26); she continues this truthfulness to the end of her journals, discovering her authorship to be one based on realism, plot development, character portraits, and lyrical descriptions of the castle and countryside.

Cassandra’s discovered authorship is the opposite of her father’s experience in trying to regain confidence in his writing. James Mortmain’s Jacob Wrestling is a piece of surrealist writing that, though extremely popular with American critics, remains baffling to Cassandra. Simon describes Mortmain’s authorship and “a link in the chain of writers who have been obsessed by form” (140); Jacob Wrestling is a precursor to the work of James Joyce and other modernist writers. Mortmain’s sense of authorship was lost following the completion of Jacob Wrestling, his brief incarceration, and his wife’s death. The events of the book, while centered on the romantic lives of Cassandra and Rose, are bordered by the struggle Mortmain has with finding the motivation to work. When he does begin collecting “materials” again, it is with a mind still concentrated on form: puzzles, riddles, detective stories, and the simulated emotional experience of learning to read. Simon describes Mortmain’s philosophy of authorship as “search-creation,” requiring the author to let their mind accumulate influences and then write about the experience of that accumulation through varied forms.

Mortmain’s focus on form influences the reader’s understanding of Cassandra’s discovery of her authorship, even though her writing focuses on emotive realism. As a form, Cassandra’s journal writing requires introspection and self-evaluation. Therefore, the form she chose influenced the sense of authorship she arrived at by completing her journal and how she no longer plans to write about herself (342). By connecting Mortmain’s style of authorship with Cassandra’s discovery of her own, Smith allows I Capture the Castle’s form to embody the character arc of its protagonist. 

Cassandra’s and Mortmain’s sense of authorship is instigated by the arrival of the Cottons at Scoatney Hall. Simon and Mrs. Cotton are enthusiastic literary critics and financial patrons of the Mortmains; without them, Cassandra would not have found her story, and Mortmain would not have found the energy to write again. Their individual but connected creative dependence on the Cottons implies the necessity of intellectual and financial patrons as the foundation of productive authorship that leads to publication.

Published in 1948, I Capture the Castle explores themes of femininity, the transition from traditional gender roles to those influenced by feminist movements, and the literary structure of the marriage plot, which characterizes novels written primarily by Regency and Victorian-era English writers. These writers focused the plots of their novels around a woman’s courtship, engagement, and marriage. Smith explores this theme primarily through the contrast between Rose’s and Cassandra’s conceptions of marriage and femininity.

Rose is a static character whose unfailing motivation in the novel is to marry a reasonably wealthy man and save herself from poverty. She is described as beautiful but without practical talents that can be applied to the family’s income: “Now if anyone in this family is nil as an earner, it is Rose; for though she plays the piano a bit and sings rather sweetly and is, of course, a lovely person, she has no real talents at all” (18). Rose’s idea of femininity relies on charm, surface-level artistic accomplishments, and being pleasing to the men in her life. In this way, Rose’s character is similar to other characters in Victorian and pre-Modernist novels such as Jane Austen’s Jane Bennett (Pride and Prejudice) and Marianne Dashwood (Sense and Sensibility), both heroines of the Victorian marriage plot. Rose herself connects the Mortmain sisters’ introduction to the Cottons at the novel’s beginning with the opening of Pride and Prejudice (24). Rose has the education of a landed middle-class lady and takes her flirting and behavior cues from the characters she reads in novels to disastrous results. When applied to the Cotton brothers, these affectations nearly ruin the Mortmains’ relationship with them: “Rose got it out of old books. We’ve never known any modern women except Topaz, and Rose would never dream of copying her” (65). Rose measures her success in life by the husband she can attract and the material things he can provide, so her character development depends upon her marriage prospects, identical to other novels written with a marriage plot.

In contrast, Cassandra represents the modern literary woman influenced by feminism. She actively practices speed-writing so that she can get a job as a secretary, attain financial independence, and begin a career as a novelist. Cassandra doesn’t plan her future around her marriage prospects, as Rose does, but instead tries to cultivate greater intimacy with her interests so that she can be a more independent person. Cassandra resents the idea of women automatically thinking of marriage upon meeting single men and that marriage is thought of before love is established (55). When she and Topaz work on sewing Rose a dress that would adequately attract Simon’s attention, Cassandra notes that she “kept pretending we were in a Victorian novel” (108). As an aspiring author using her new journaling habit to discover her sense of authorship, Cassandra draws connections between her character and Rose’s through literary examples.

Cassandra’s desire to be a more modern, feminist woman than her sister is demonstrated through her refusal of both Stephen’s overt marriage proposal and Simon’s implicit one. At the conclusion of the book, Cassandra remains a single woman with plans to work, a completed character arc that usurps the marriage plot. Rose marries Neil instead of Simon—but is nevertheless married at the novel’s end. Each sister remains loyal to their concepts of femininity throughout the novel, allowing Smith to represent the dual presence of traditional and modern femininity operating in late 1940s English society.